Reach Indicator

What it does

Reach Indicator adds a small HUD readout under your crosshair that shows two numbers every time you land a melee hit:

Distance / Reach

- Distance — the true distance from your player to the nearest point on the target's hitbox at the moment of the hit (not center-to-center, so it stays accurate regardless of the target's size) On occasions it may exceed your reach. My hypthesis is that if you attack something at a certain point the attack will go through no matter what.. but the actual dmg comes through a few miliseconds later which if you back away will result in distance being higher than your reach would be.
- Reach — your current weapon's attack range, i.e. the effective cap you're working with.

The readout appears for a few seconds after each hit, then fades until your next swing.

Why

Vanilla gives no feedback on how close you actually need to be to land a hit, and center-to-center distance estimates get thrown off by big-hitbox mobs (bears, wolves, etc.) vs. small ones (dummies, chickens). This mod measures distance to the target's actual collision surface, so the number you see is consistent no matter what you're fighting.

Notes

- Client-side only, no server component, safe for multiplayer.
- No config needed — works out of the box.

 

Every entity in Vintage Story actually carries two separate boxes, plus a position that isn't where you'd expect:

- Entity.Pos — the entity's tracked position. This is feet-level, horizontally centered. It is not the center of the entity's body or hitbox.
- CollisionBox — the box used for physics: what stops the entity from walking through walls, what it lands on, what pushes it out of terrain. Tends to hug the model fairly tightly.
- SelectionBox — the box used for targeting/interaction: what the game checks when deciding whether your crosshair/attack is actually pointing at the entity. This is the box the game itself uses to decide can you hit this.

What we ended up using

Nearest-point distance against SelectionBox.

SelectionBox is the box the game itself uses to decide whether you're actually targeting/hitting the entity. Measuring against it means the number you see lines up with the game's own targeting logic, not an approximation of the entity's physical footprint.